Soho Rezanejad – ‘Six Archetypes’

Exploring Jungian notions of personality with particular focus upon the anima (the feminine inner to the unconscious male shell), Danish singer and artist Soho Rezanejad’s debut album Six Archetypes is a remarkable sea of souls, the fluidity of the self as powerful metaphor for and expression of resistance and progress.

Here – to borrow and twist a phrase – she do the thought police in different voices. Not to indicate fracture but instead to depict the stippling, indeterminate passage of being. Rezanejad weaves a fascinating cabaret, stylistically ranging across fields, encompassing everything from frazzled spoken word to full-on ravey-davey. The lyrical text, which likewise spans murmur to declaration, was developed through communal free-association, and completes the effect of palimpsest and testimony.

Pivotal to the conceit, however, are the fluctuating character and register of Rezanejad’s vocals. The PR puff for this album makes just comparison to Laurie Anderson and Kate Bush, but if we’re to extend the soundy-likeyness, there’s also Lisa Gerrard, Annette Peacock, Regine Fetet, Sheila Chandra, Nico, Ono and Nyro in here (to my ears).

In a fabulous meta twist, the final track – Elegie – shares its nomenclature with the envoi of Patti Smith’s Horses; only here, instead of a lament, we’re presented with a Farsi refutation of Iran’s current Muslim autocracy. It’s spiral, riffing internal logic like this which hallmarks the album; if the inspiration may be sometimes obtuse due to its realisation through multiple voices, the end result is implacable.

And yet, listen now, here’s me, some bloke, saying some woman sounds like some other women, and all the rest; how reductive. If Six Archetypes means nothing else, it plants a flag to say we are all alive, fluid and potentiated even as embattled. Give it a listen and erase my blah with your own; that’s the whole point.